How to Eliminate Procrastination

We live in a world that demands much out of us. Every single day, there are things that are expected of us, that we have to deliver. Things such as work, expectations from family, and even things that we privately want to do but seem to have limited time resources to reach there. As a result, inner stress builds up, and it turns into us stepping into the dark side of our personality. Procrastination becomes a kind of solace.

There are several reasons why procrastination exists. In order for you to detect what this is, you need to do some self reflection in order to uncover the causes. First, procrastination happens when you don’t have clarity in your mission. A lot of this causes people to be very busy, but with no clear intent in terms of the greater scheme of things. You don’t know why you’re doing it, what you’re going to gain from it, other than some kind of superficial achievement. After going through this several times in your life, you might get sick of it, and just decide to lay back. To eliminate this form of procrastination, one needs to understand one’s own mission, and to align oneself to the vision of the picture. Of course, it takes more than just a blog post to show this, but it is necessary to highlight this first when I speak about personal alignment. The first step there is to really identify what stops you from doing what you want. From that, it will enable you to confront whatever excuses you may have been making for yourself.

Second, procrastination happens when you experience imbalance in your energies. This may happen when you are upset by something, overworked or stressed, or simply disturbed by some kind of event that happened in your life. It’s likely that you then take a step back in order to recover from it. In order to deal with this kind of presentation, you need to learn to recover your energies. The first way that I usually recommend is a process of meditation. A simple start of the day would be to meditate on what you feel grateful for so that you can start the day on a clean slate.

Third, procrastination happens when you are anticipating meaningless activity. For example, some people feel this way when they have to do an assignment for their professor. It is common to wait till the last minute, because there doesn’t seem to be very much value in doing this assignment! Likewise, one may feel the same about doing their taxes, going on the treadmill, or any other kind of activity that may appear to be mundane. The key to dealing with this formal procrastination is simply to reframe oneself. Is a powerful technique in NLP, you can simply think about how else you can interpret this activity. For example, doing an assignment could help you to win favors with friends who themselves are procrastinators. Let them do their research via your report to make life easy for them and with some friends. As for taxes, you might rationalize to yourself that if you don’t do it you’re gonna be fined by the government. In terms of housework, you might think of a person whom you love at home and decide that you just do it simply because you want to contribute to the family.

Ultimately, the way that I view destination is that it is a signal that something in our system is not aligned. We need to constantly be aware that the moment we don’t feel like doing something, is a strong indicator that we need to get ourselves grounded and more focused so that we can accomplish our best life ever.

About Stuart Tan

Stuart Tan, MSc, MBA, SDCG, BA (Hons), is a Licensed NLP Trainer since 1997, and is Singapore's first Licensed NLP Coach Trainer, a trained counselor and trauma and depression therapist since 1999, a Master Motivational Coach with the Institute of Motivational Coaching and a leadership, team performance and change management consultant. He certifies NLP Practitioners and NLP Master Practitioners, NLP Business Practitioners and NLP Business Master Practitioners and Certified Motivational Coaches (CMC) as well as Licensed NLP Coaches.
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